Crossroads, Winter 2005:
feature story

SAILING ACTS

Aboard Sailing Acts (and occasionally by land), they traveled to all 36 ports mentioned in
the book of Acts in connection with the Apostle Paul. The entire trip lasted 18 months,
including a winter spent in Israel. That first night after that first day of sailing in June
2004, having negotiated about 15 miles of the planned 3,600, Linford was seasick, Janet
had a rope burn on her hand, and the windlass on the anchor didn’t work.
by Jeremy Nafziger (C 90)

The boat that would
become Sailing Acts was 25
years old and not particularly
well cared-for when
Linford and Janet Stutzman bought it.
But the ketch had what they were
looking for: seaworthiness first, as well
as the classic lines that Linford wanted
and the wood interior that Janet had
pictured. In the port of Volos, Greece,
they replaced the sails and the lines, a
hatch, a hot water heater, a spray
hood. As they followed the trail of the
Apostle Paul, there would be more to
fix along the way.

They got lucky when the titling and
flagging and insurance process,
conducted by fax and phone across
two continents (while they prepared
to visit a third) went much faster than
they could have dreamed. And three
months after they bought the
Aldebaran, they rechristened it Sailing
Acts, were handed the insurance
papers within minutes of untying, and
headed out from the port best known
for launching the voyages of Jason and
the Argonauts.

There had been no time for a sea trial:
the journey itself was the trial, a test of
how well various parts of their lives
had come together to create this
excursion. In the past, there was the
boat Linford built with his father for
use on a Canadian lake, the sailing the
Stutzmans have done over the years,
the skill of existing with a limited
network of support that they had
acquired through years as resident
aliens in far-flung lands (four years in
Australia and 12 in Germany with
Eastern Mennonite Missions, and a
year in Israel even apart from leading
the EMU Middle East cross-cultural
three times), the way they worked
together at problems while
maintaining their own opinions, and
the theological study that has made up
Linford’s professional life.

Then there were some skills they
didn’t know they had: Linford filled
one of Janet’s teeth along the way
using a travel dentistry kit they’d
brought.

“It was the most challenging and
rewarding experience in my life to this
point,” Linford says, back at the
Stutzman’s home in Park View. He is
again teaching in the seminary and
Bible and religion department; Janet,
formerly director of alumni relations, is
handling telephone fundraising
campaigns for the development office.
“We did things we have never experienced
or thought about, and the
rewards were because of that,” he says.
“We were using all of life’s experiences,
including academic ones, to do this.”

Here is what they did: Aboard Sailing Acts (and occasionally by
land), they traveled to all 36 ports
mentioned in the book of Acts in
connection with the Apostle Paul.
The entire trip lasted 18 months,
including a winter spent in Israel.
That first night after that first day of
sailing in June 2004, having
negotiated about 15 miles of the
planned 3,600, Linford was seasick,
Janet had a rope burn on her hand,
and the windlass on the anchor
didn’t work. They say they gained
confidence just from having simply
made it that far.

Even after months more of sailing
and dozens of Mediterranean
moorings, when they could sail the
boat like the rest of us drive cars, “every meal was a celebration,”
Linford says, “because even if [the
day] was really hard, you had
survived. Our number one priority
was to continue the journey.”

“We had overall goals, but we did it
one day at a time,” Janet says.
Linford remembers when it started
to come to him. He and Janet were
at Harod’s harbor in the former
Roman outpost of Caesarea, now in
Israel, where Paul had spent two
years in prison. An instructor on
the trip had exhorted them to “read
the Bible with their feet,” that
cross-cultural experiences without
context are “like playing chess
without the board.” They were
reading with their feet, all right, but
on land. And it occurred to Linford
that the sea beyond the harbor was
the means by which Paul had
gained his knowledge of the
kingdom of Rome. The ocean winds
as much as Paul’s curiosity, even
awe, for the empire had driven him
to Rome to meet the caesar.

In the Old Testament, Linford says,
the sea was something to be feared.
After the sea is separated from the
land in Genesis, it is parted to
Even after months
more of sailing,
when they could sail
the boat like the rest
of us drive cars, “every meal was a
celebration, because
even if [the day] was
really hard, you had
survived. Our
number one priority
was to continue the
journey,” says
Linford.
accommodate the exodus—and then it
swallows the Egyptian army (and this
story is mentioned dozens of times
thereafter).

The sea is something that cannot be
crossed in Deuteronomy 30; Job says
that God makes “the depths to churn
like a boiling cauldron”; and Isaiah
describes the wicked as “like the
tossing sea, which cannot rest.”

To be sure, Solomon (in 1 Kings) “had
a fleet of trading ships at sea… Once
every three years it returned, carrying
gold, silver and ivory, and apes and
baboons.”

And Isaiah speaks of “righteousness
like the waves of the sea,” though the
point is not that the sea is forgiving,
but that it is massive.

Ezekiel 27 has a description of Iron
Age ships and their trade, one that
archeologists who discovered a boat
from that period off Ashkelon, Israel,
find stunningly accurate. Of course, it
comes in the form of a lament for the
sea city of Tyre, whose “oarsmen will
take you out to the high seas, but the
east wind will break you to pieces in
the heart of the sea.”

And then there’s that whole Jonah
incident.

In the end, the Israelites are always
finding God in the mountains, from
whence cometh their help. The sea is
never part of Israel, but its border.

This all changes in the New
Testament, Linford says. From Acts 13,
where Paul sets out from Antioch on
the first of the missionary journeys
that just about every printed version of
the Bible feels compelled to display on
maps, to the start of Revelations, the
New Testament occurs in and around
the sea, the Mediterranean and
Aegean. Most of Jesus’ ministry occurs
not around the Dead Sea mentioned
often in the Old Testament, but
around the Sea of Galilee. The waters
are a source of sustenance for the new
“fishers of men.” And for Paul, the sea
became the key to the Roman world,
the way to bring the Jews together
with the Greeks in a kingdom of God
in which there is no east or west.

The countries west of the Holy Land
still appreciate it: Greece has a
national holiday for Peter and Paul,
and the Stutzmans were in Malta by
chance on Paul Day, celebrated with
bands, parades and confetti.

Not long after Caesarea, Linford started to see, through a glass darkly at first, that just maybe they could do it—read it with their feet by trying it under sail. Once he mapped it out, though the route changed many times, they could imagine it, and they started to collect things in a chest at home— nautical instruments and books and charts—and to take their pocket cruiser out on the Chesapeake Bay, and to give each other gifts that were for the trip as much as for the other person. Janet quit her job, Linford had a sabbatical coming.

While Paul made three legendary journeys, the Stutzmans compressed them into a single route that would
reach the ports that Paul reached. From Volos, they visited sites along the Turkish coast on the Aegean, then the Greek ports near the northern end of that sea, working their way back down to Athens. Then it was back to Tarsus in Turkey, much further east, and Cyprus before hunkering down for
the winter in Israel. Three months’
more sailing in the spring took
them to Crete and Malta, and
finally to Rome.

In all their searching before and
since the trip, they have found no
one else who has done the trip—at
least no one who has written about
it. Except for Paul, of course, or
Luke, more exactly, generally
credited as the author of Acts. It is
clear to the Stutzmans that Luke—
or whoever it was—was with Paul
much of the way. The pronoun “we”
is one reason, but more telling is the
detail that survives in the text and
simply must have been recorded in
real time. (See Acts 27:39-44 for
just one example of many.) And
since the narrative contains
relatively little detail of Paul’s land
travels, some suspect that Luke was
traveling at sea for the first time,
making everything there new.

“There is virtually nothing you can
dispute,” Linford says. “You could
almost sail by Acts.” Even off Malta,
the soundings that the sailors take
just before the shipwreck in Acts 27
are within 10 feet of what the
Stutzmans measured themselves at
the same spot where the Roman
sailors “sensed that they were
approaching land.” The sailors used a
lead ball on a weight, the Stutzmans
an electronic depth finder. “A boat is kind of a miniature island on which a society of two people live, leaving it only occasionally for cross-cultural
experiences in port,”
writes Linford.
Janet says the boat
was a place where
you wake up and
“you’re always at
home.”

And the shipwreck itself jives with
known facts: the Romans were sailing
too late in the season (Acts 27:9: “Much time had been lost, and sailing
had already become dangerous”),
trying to get in a second round trip to
Alexandria with another load of grain,
the fuel for the superpower of the day
as much as oil is for ours. They had to
wait until spring to make the short trip
from Malta between Sicily and the toe
of the Italian boot up to the port
nearest Rome. Likewise, if you know
that Paul at other times sailed from
one coastal port to another aboard a
50-foot coastal cruiser and that the
ship’s square rigging meant it could
only get a favorable wind from only
about 180 degrees of the compass, it
makes sense that he often sat in a
given port for days and had time to get
out and preach.

While the boat that ran aground in
Malta carried 276 people, the
Stutzmans were alone most of the
time. Their son David and his fiancée
(now wife) joined them for a spell in
Greece, and two EMU grads currently
traveling around the world (Eric
Kennel and David Landis) joined
them when they departed from their
winter quarters in Ashkelon. Students
on the EMU Aegean cross-cultural in
the summer of 2005 also sailed with
them, and they had a few other shortterm
visitors.

“A boat is kind of a miniature island
on which a society of two people live,
leaving it only occasionally for crosscultural
experiences in port,” Linford
wrote in an online journal they kept
up throughout the journey. (See
www.emu.edu/sailingacts for the whole
thing.) Janet says the boat, a Westerly
33, was a place where “you wake up in
a different place, and you’re always at
home.”

And at every port they would meet
fellow sailors, many of them with
considerable experience and
knowledge. The Stutzmans remain in
touch with a lot of them, including
one who has since lost a finger to an
anchor chain and another who was
arrested for fishing two drowning
refugees out of the water. The winter
in Ashkelon found them in a
community of dock-dwellers, all with
their own stories. Linford used the
time to work on two books, writing
from dawn till noon in the tiny salon
with Janet tending to boat chores just
feet away.

Sailing Acts, the story of the trip
written for a popular audience, is
expected to be published in the spring
of 2006 by Good Books. The second
book’s working title is Kingdom, Power,
and Glory—What Christians in
Globalization Can Learn from Paul in
the Roman Empire. A draft is done, and
Linford anticipates a fall 2006 release
from the same house.

The latter is written for a more
scholarly reader. The title refers,
Linford says, to the three elements
that were inseparable in the Roman
empire. The book argues that Paul
understood the kingdom of God as a
similar sort of empire, one whose
power to unite disparate cultures
under one citizenship means that
there is no slave or free, no Jew or
Greek. Paul did not condemn any of
the Roman institutions he found.
Nearly every port he visited had a
temple to Aphrodite, which was the
adult bookstore and then some of
the day. The one in Corinth was
huge, and Paul doesn’t even
mention it. Instead, in Corinthians,
he wrote one of the Bible’s greatest
descriptions of love—the very thing
the goddess was supposed to
represent—thus, Linford says,
redeeming the pagan for a holy use.
Paul does similar things with the
Greek/Roman ideals of beauty,
health and success.

In fact, Linford says, Paul found
that the goodness in the pagan
Romans “that made it possible for
him to do what he did.” The
superpower that sometimes so
suppressed and persecuted the
Jewish religion and early Christians
(as Paul/Saul himself had) also had
the power to facilitate the spreading
of the radical good news and may
have been the only thing that could
have done so in those early times.

Leaving Ashkelon in April 2005
with Kennel and Landis on what
was supposed to be a 40-hour trip,
the porthole gaskets started leaking
in high seas that washed over the
deck. It became clear, especially
when two of those on board got
really sick, that 40 hours was out of
the question. They checked the
chart and found the Israeli harbor of
Herzliya was not far, but knew that
they would not make it by dark and
that entering an unfamiliar harbor
without customs clearance was
dangerous. A couple they knew
from the winter in Ashkelon had
taken their multi-million dollar
Finally, like Paul,
they came to Rome,
with an appreciation
of destination and
of how their
predecessor must
have felt that he
had arrived.
Linford walked the
last 35 miles into
the city on the
Appian Way over
several days.
yacht to Herzliya, and Sailing Acts was
able to raise them on the radio. The
man said to come in, he would alert
the customs and prepare a berth—any
harbor in a storm. The docking went
off without a hitch. And their friends
came over with hot gourmet soup, sat
in the cabin and let them talk,
knowing, Janet says, as fellow sailors
would that a crew who had just been
through all that would need to debrief.

That day, however, was not the time
they came the closest to losing the
ship. The time they came within yards
of getting run down by a freighter in
the dark was the scariest, but the time they thought they were closest to
sinking was when they sailed 50 miles
from Troas to St. Paul’s Bay on
Limnos. They had a perfect wind and
new sails and went 10 miles on the
same tack. However, this tack had
tilted the deck just enough to
submerge the hole the bilge pump uses
to get rid of water in the hull, though
even that shouldn’t have caused what
happened, which was that when they
got near the bay and the boat
straightened up, Linford saw a lot of
water in the boat and it seemed to still
be coming in. From where, he did not
know. While Janet, in the captain’s
chair, looked for a good place to run
the boat aground, Linford bailed by
hand for 45 minutes or so until they
finally figured out the source—and the
water wasn’t coming in as fast as
they'd feared. They dropped the
anchor and fixed the problem.

Finally, like Paul, they came to Rome,
with an appreciation of destination
and of how their predecessor must
have felt that he had arrived. Linford
walked the last 35 miles into the city
on the Appian Way over several days.

Paul was allowed to live in Rome for
two years, under guard but not your
typical prisoner. Acts ends: “Boldly
and without hindrance he preached
the kingdom of God and taught about
the Lord Jesus Christ.” While Paul
later left Rome for more travels (some
think he went all the way to Spain)
and was later arrested and executed
when Nero took power, the Stutzmans’
trip had a happier end.

And they will also get to travel again.
They considered selling the boat. They
couldn’t. They sailed it from Paul’s last
Acts port in Puteoli to Tropea, Italy,
arriving with a broken shaft and no
working motor. The boat has
reportedly been fixed since they left it,
and they will get back on it after they
lead the EMU cross-cultural to the
Middle East this spring. They will sail
it to Turkey, where the slips are
cheaper. From there, they don’t know
yet. But having shown that you can
sail the same sea twice, the Stutzmans
are ready for the next adventure.